KS2 / KS3 PSHE: Becoming a record-breaking yachtswoman

As a kid, I really loved sailing, and if you really love sailing, where's the furthest that you can sail? Well, it had to be around the world, didn't it? I was trying to be the fastest person ever to sail solo non-stop around the world, and I achieved that, finishing in 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 very important seconds.

I remember like it was yesterday, the first time that I ever went down to the sea. I went down with my grandma and my elder brother, and we were good to go sailing for four days. I remember the excitement that I felt inside as we got closer to the water. The most amazing thing was stepping on the boat for the first time, this tiny little boat that we could only just squeeze onto. But when we hoisted those sails, it was the greatest sense of freedom that I could ever imagine.

I returned to Derbyshire, where I grew up, about as far away from the sea as you can possibly get. I dreamt about sailing, determined that one day I would sail around the world. One of the big challenges when you want to go sailing is, obviously, having a boat, and when I was four years old, I obviously didn't have one. But from the age of eight, I started saving my Christmas money and birthday money. I never had pocket money, so when I was aged 11, at secondary school, I started to have mashed potato and baked beans every single day, including free gravy. I got through a lot of free gravy in our school! And every day, I'd save the pennies. When that little pile of pennies reached 100, I'd drop it into the money box. I'd draw a little cross on the 100-square chart that I'd drawn on a piece of paper behind it. Once eventually that chart was full with £100, I'd go along to the building society. It was like that that I bought my first, second, and then third boat.

At school, I thought if you wanted to be successful in life, you had to go to university, and I thought my way to sail around the world would be, one day, to save enough money to buy a boat to do that. But when I was 17 and doing my exam results, trying to get into university, I was struck down with glandular fever. That changed my mind because I realised there was a different way to sail around the world through a TV programme on at three o'clock in the morning about the Whitbread Round the World Race. I remember seeing the images of these people sailing around the world, the images of the action, the images of the sea, the music. And I watched all this, and I said, in that second, "That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to find a sponsor, and I'm going to sail around the world."

I feel really lucky to have known exactly what I was trying to do when I was a kid, and to know that every single step that I made in my life was trying to take me closer to that goal. It was a massive goal, virtually impossible for a kid that grew up in Derbyshire to sail around the world. But I knew exactly where I was going, and it helped me make all the decisions to get to that point.

Sailing around the world, you see different things every day. The sea's a different colour, the sky's different, the wildlife around you is different. You're basically watching the ocean, but it's ever-changing. When you come around Cape Horn, this tiny gap between the tip of South America and Antarctica, you come out and you head north. The first sunset, generally, is absolutely stunning with brighter colours than you can ever imagine. Or deep in the Southern Ocean, where the waves are 40, 50, 60 feet high, almost as high as the mast of the boat, and yet you're sailing down those waves. Sometimes, when the clouds move, you see the moon. You feel like you're sailing down these moonlit, sparkling mountains. It's absolutely beautiful.

I was asked, when I finished sailing around the world, whether the day I finished in Falmouth was the biggest day of my life. It was asked by a journalist. I turned around to him and I said, "I'm sure that's still to come, but it's not a bad one." And I really believe in that. The biggest thing, the most incredible thing that will ever happen to you is always in front of you. And the moment you think it's not, life gets a bit boring.